Authorities must disclose accurate COVID numbers
A day after observing a spike of 18 hospitalizations in Quebec due to the pandemic, the Health Ministry reported a drop of 19 on Friday — a whiplash discrepancy that officials were at a loss to explain given a major hospital outbreak in St-eustache since Monday.
A ministry official initially blamed the discrepancy in hospitalizations from one day to the next on the transfer of data to a new computer system. “The changes you see in the data can be explained by the fact that the (ministry) is currently changing its information systems,” spokesperson Robert Maranda said in an email.
“As of July 27, 2020, the V10 information system was replaced by the Trajectoire de santé publique platform. This new system was put in place to computerize the investigation forms on COVID -19 cases. During the transition, which will last a few days, the updating of some graphics will be affected.”
On Thursday, when the ministry released its daily bulletin, it noted there were some discrepancies in the figures on infections and deaths. However, the government made no mention of problems in record-keeping for hospitalizations, which have occurred amid a COVID-19 resurgence and outbreaks all over the province.
That same day, the Hôpital de Saint-eustache announced that an outbreak infected 14 patients and 11 staff since July 27.
Although there is often a two-day lag in recording hospitalizations, Quebec’s revised figures have shown a steady decline every day since Monday.
“The (ministry) includes data provided by regional public health departments,” Maranda added. “If the data concerning hospitalizations at St-eustache Hospital are not included in the (ministry) data, it is because they were not provided. It is always necessary to calculate one or two days of delays before the data transmission to the (ministry)."
The next part of the explanation is a little hard to follow, and Maranda was not immediately available to clarify.
“In addition, there was an error in reporting from the Laurentians region yesterday in not including 15 cases on July 28. These have been added to the total number, but the (ministry) is now publishing the number of new cases reported yesterday only.”
Got that? The upshot is that even though the number of hospitalizations should have gone up, as a result of the hospital outbreak in St-eustache, those figures have not been reflected in Friday’s numbers. This discrepancy is the latest in a series of information gaffes since the peak of the first wave in the pandemic, when Premier François Legault withheld for more than two weeks stats on deaths and infections in eldercare homes because he said the data had to be “cleaned up.”
On the Fête nationale, Quebec announced it was switching from daily to weekly bulletins on COVID-19 cases, just before the resurgence. Two days later, Health Minister Christian Dubé announced a return to the daily updates following a public outcry.
But the information gaffes have continued. The Montreal public health department provided daily stats on the number of outbreaks in bars in the second week of July, but then stopped releasing the data without explanation on July 16.
Since Monday, the local health department has not issued daily neighbourhood breakdowns because of “technical difficulties.” It also hasn’t released its weekly update on community transmission of the coronavirus. The Institut national de santé publique du Quebec (INSPQ) has also stopped divulging its regional updates.
And the Mcgill University Health Centre did not release its internal update on hospitalizations for Thursday and Friday due to “an administrative oversight.”
Such information gaffes do not instil confidence as the government prepares to boost the size of public gatherings from 50 to 250 on Monday. On Thursday, Montreal orthopedic surgeon
David Zukor started an online petition urging the government to reverse allowing the larger gatherings.
By Friday night, more than 1,300 people, many of them health professionals, signed the petition.
The larger context is that the highly contagious coronavirus is spreading all over Quebec in multiple settings, including day camps, hockey rinks, liquor stores, bars, parties and among families. In a tweet Friday afternoon, Dubé pointed out that 66.3 per cent of cases in Quebec are linked to community and family transmission.
What’s noteworthy is that more than 19 per cent of cases are being found in the workplace, a rate of infection that’s higher than among health workers. A ministry official disclosed last Friday that 15 per cent of cases are among health workers, much lower than Legault suggested the same day. According to Dubé’s latest figures, the rate of infection in the health sector is even lower: 6.4 per cent.
With Quebec set to reopen elementary and high schools in four weeks, rising transmission among children and teenagers is also worrisome. An outbreak at a Boucherville day camp has resulted in collateral damage. In addition to the 27 cases at the camp, 19 more have been identified among relatives.
With so much at stake in this resurgence, it’s incumbent on authorities to at the very least resume disclosing more accurate numbers on a daily basis.
This discrepancy is the latest in a series of information gaffes since the peak.